So what's your dissertation about?

For years I have been practicing how to answer that question. Every conversation with a friend or relative inevitable turns to that topic, and I am forced once again to stumble my way through a shoddy explanation. The reaction is always the same. The face betrays a combination of confusion and boredom, followed by a half-hearted, "That sounds interesting."


Next subject.


I certainly can't blame them. These are all intelligent people. They didn't understand my explanation because I didn't understand it. I knew the questions I was asking, I just didn't have the language to formulate a dissertation into a refrigerator magnet. It's like taking four hundred gallons of sea water and trying to distill it into a single glass of drinkable water.

But today I had a breakthrough.

My dissertation explores nationalism. (For those of you who don't have a copy of Ben Anderson on your nightstand, nationalism involves the study of how groups of people imagine themselves as having things in common with other groups of people. We are a nation because we share common traits. These can be a common language, religion, ethnicity, or political philosophy.)

In Thailand, historians have always credited two institutions with creating a sense of community: Buddhism and the monarchy. I will argue that a third factor has been overlooked - the collective memory of national humiliation.

Thailand's loss of territory to French imperialism created deep scars on the national psyche. These act like traumatic childhold memories that can cause re-lapses and influence behavior later on (ie. the current political crisis over Preah Vihear).

Collective memories of victimhood form an integral part of what it means to be 'Thai'. The communal sense of resentment and bitterness towards the west provides an additional sense of cohesion to an otherwise diverse group of people. It also means that a country which was never colonized is afflicted by a post-colonial mindset.

So there it is - my future contribution to knowledge. Not as ground-breaking as Orientalism or the Bush Doctrine, but hopefully good enough to get a diploma and one day...a job.